The noise, the smells — and the people

On the opening page of The Waning of the Middle Ages, Johan Huizinga remarked that ‘we, at the present day, can hardly understand the keenness with which a fur coat, a good fire on the hearth, a soft bed, a glass of wine were formerly enjoyed’. Well, C. M. Woolgar can. Not that he is more learned or imaginative than his great predecessor, although he is a fine scholar and a good writer. It is just that the experience of life in the Middle Ages is less distant and arcane than Huizinga thought. Writing in the 1920s in the tradition of romantic pessimism which has dominated so much writing about the Middle Ages, he saw an unbridgeable gulf between medieval perceptions and our own. It seems less obvious to those accustomed to the homogeneous and in some ways irrational mass-culture of the 21st century.

Of course, the world of physical sensations must have been different for medieval people at some levels. Take the sense of hearing or sight. Even in the middle of a busy city, the level of background noise or light was low. Medieval people were not bombarded by sensations all their waking hours. They often enjoyed the luxury of total silence or darkness. A face out of the black night, a tread out of the stillness, these things must have been felt with a special intensity which it is difficult for us to recapture. A man shouting, a dog barking, a cart clattering over cobbles, a bucket of bricks dropped on the ground, were once among the loudest noises that a man would ever hear. They were also sounds produced by the direct actions of humans or animals, not by the impersonal power of automated machinery. At the great battle of Roosebeke between the French and the Flemings in 1382, an observer described the eerie sound of an army advancing silently on foot across the soft ground towards the waiting enemy, with only the regular metallic clink of 20,000 coats of chain mail disturbing the quiet dawn at every step, followed by a trumpet call and the shock of a great cacophony of human voices yelling out in unison their battle cries and shouts of pain.